As the need for increased data processing expands, many companies have developed data centers to act as data warehouses. Such data centers can include a large number of individual computer systems. Oftentimes, such systems are configured as server computers such as blade servers that are adapted in racks. While many of the systems may be used for data storage and retrieval, various systems can be differently configured to handle different tasks. To provide for different system configurations, typically personnel of the data center will manually configure individual systems with different hardware settings and/or software to enable their use for different tasks. This system configuration will typically be centralized at a resource manager (or provisioning agent) and will require a high level of human intervention.
For example, in some data center environments, it can be useful to provide different configurations to different servers to enable the handling of different workloads with optimum performance and lowest costs. However to do this, it is required to provide a server identifier and configuration information to a provisioning agent, to differentiate the server and to properly handle the configuration. However, this raises complexity and requires a high level of manual intervention to determine the abilities of each server, in order to determine the correct provisioning and establish a mapping, at the provisioning agent, between this correct provisioning and the particular server.
Some amount of provisioning of a system in a data center can be done in a so-called pre-boot environment in which an operating system has yet to be loaded on the machine. One such pre-boot environment in current use is called a pre-boot execution environment (PXE) in which a network-connected system can be provided with software such as operating system (OS). However, PXE suffers known drawbacks such as the use of user datagram protocol (UDP) for communication, which is a non-reliable protocol. In addition, it requires a minimum configuration for relating server information, such as a media access control (MAC) address with the OS image. Finally, provisioning a system using PXE has limited possibilities to carry out policy and capability-based resource allocation.